LINGUIST List 10.1973

Sun Dec 19 1999

Qs: Ispell Dictionaries, Cross-ling Advertising

Editor for this issue: Lydia Grebenyova <lydialinguistlist.org>

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Hi,
This question is for the more computationally-oriented members of the list,
from a software person who didn't thrive in his college linguistics class:
I was wondering what the commonly-held opinion is about the quality of
ispell dictionaries for various languages (and the tools for building them)?
The reason I ask is that I'm one of the principal authors of AbiWord, a
widely-used Open Source word processor which currently runs natively on a
variety of platforms (Win32, Linux, BeOS, Solaris, FreeBSD, etc.). We've
had a lot of success locating translators for the user interface, but
getting ispell dictionaries to work for languages other than English has
been a real headache.
One of the key features we implemented early on was the kind of interactive
spell checking found in all modern word processors -- those little red
squiggles and popup menus that users either love or hate.
To do so, we're reading ispell-format dictionaries directly, which is
working out beautifully for English, but we're running into trouble handling
ispell dictionaries for other languages which don't seem to interact well
with our internal Unicode representations of the document content.
I suspect that our underlying problem is purely a software issue that we'll
eventually learn enough to figure out, but I'd feel a lot more comfortable
investing that effort if I knew that the quality of the resulting
dictionaries was likely to be worth the effort.
Any opinions or assistance we could get on this issue would be very much
appreciated.
Thanks!
Paul
PS: Anyone interested in AbiWord itself can download source or binaries of
the latest development release from our website:
http://www.abisource.com/

Greetings!
For a class I will teach next fall for freshmen at Indiana University
(a general ed requirement, not a linguistics course per se) entitled
"The Language of Advertising", I am interested in finding as many
examples as possible of advertising slogans, logos, product names, and
the like, which create embarrassment or misunderstanding when an ad
campaign is mounted in another language/culture. The classic example
is Chevrolet's car the Nova, which didn't exactly fly off the shelves
in Spanish-speaking countries, because the name Nova got reparsed as
"no va", meaning 'doesn't go'! Or, Sports Illustrated this week ran
the following little snippet:
Lifetime Achievement in Advertising: Sega, the Japanese electronics
giant, paid several million dollars for the right to put its name on
the jerseys of the Italian soccer team Sampdoria, little realizing
that _sega_ is Italian slang for masturbation.
Pretty funny! If people who know of other such examples will email
them to me, I will gratefully post a summary in the fullness of time.
Thanks in advance!
George Fowler
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George Fowler [Email] gfowlerindiana.edu
Dept. of Slavic Languages [dept. tel.] 1-812-855-9906/-2608/-2624
Ballantine 502 [dept. fax] 1-812-855-2107
1020 E. Kirkwood Ave. [home tel./fax] 1-317-726-1482/-1642
Indiana University [Slavica tel./fax] 1-812-856-4186/-4187
Bloomington, IN 47405-7103 USA [Slavica toll-free] 1-877-SLAVICA
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